Better left buried, p.23
Better Left Buried, page 23
Only Audrey shows any emotion, her face twisting as she realizes that I have come. And come alone. “Oh no, Sundress,” she says tenderly.
She says it like someone familiar with grief, and my stomach nearly bottoms out.
But I square my shoulders.
“I know what you did,” I tell Gus. “And I’m here to take Audrey home.”
The Anselms’ inability to agree with one another has probably saved my life—or at least prolonged it. They have been arguing about what to do with me for nearly an hour when Lucy arrives.
She’s wearing that yellow dress with the sunflowers, one of her endless array of bright floral dresses.
She is pale beneath the moon’s light, her freckles standing out against her skin.
“Oh no, Sundress,” I whisper.
Beside me, Gus shivers. Another tear traces a line on his cheek, and he stares down at the ruptured pavement beneath our feet. The gun trembles in his hands.
But Lucy tells them, I know what you did, so that must mean others do, too, right?
Lucy’s mom and my mom and Cliff and the deputy will come roaring in, red-and-blue lights flashing, and it will all be okay.
“Oh, do you, my dear?” Veronica asks idly, folding her perfectly manicured hands together. She steps forward, shielding Gus slightly with her own shoulder.
I’m standing so close to her that I can hear the click of her bloodred fake nails on the wooden railing of the roller coaster platform.
“Yes,” Lucy says in a voice that shakes only a little. “You’re a murderer. All of you are murderers. But especially you, right, Gus?”
Gus whimpers, a sound from low in his throat. “I didn’t mean to,” he says. “I didn’t.”
“Shut up,” Blake says softly. “I’ve had enough of all this nonsense.”
Lucy turns a shade paler, but she keeps walking toward us. “I know what you did,” she repeats. “And I’m here to make a deal.”
Veronica cocks her head, apparently considering. “What could you possibly have to offer us, little girl?” she asks. “We have everything we need already.”
“Such a shame,” Curtis says, shaking his head at her. “I tried to warn you, you know. You have spunk. You could have lived, and Katy could have lived. I never wanted either of you to get hurt by this.”
Veronica scowls at him. “You always were a sellout,” she says icily. “All those years threatening to reveal the truth about the Prestons. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Lucy flinches. “Curtis,” she says, a little shakily. “I know you cared about us.”
His face hardens. “I did,” he says. “I do. But I tried to warn you away. And I made it easy for you, little Lucy. Arthur wasn’t around to spill secrets he was meant to keep, and still you kept on looking.”
My stomach churns. “Like father, like son,” I say.
Blake backhands me across the face.
I don’t make a sound, but Gus whimpers.
“Such a shame,” Curtis says. His eyes are mercilessly hard when he looks at me. “Such a shame that you couldn’t live with what you had helped your mother do. And killing Katy Preston’s daughter on top of all that?” He shakes his head at me in mock reproval. “How could you do something like this? Haeter Lake will be talking about your cursed family for years.”
I lunge at him, and Blake catches my arm, dragging me backward. “You fucker,” I snarl. “Stay away from Lucy. Stay away from my mom.”
“Oh,” Lucy says breathily. “No. I don’t think you’ll do that, Curtis.”
“And why is that?” Blake asks impatiently. “Are you hoping to buy enough time for rescue to come? Because I hate to break this to you. No one is coming to help you.”
“Actually,” Lucy says, “there’s quite a bit more than that. Gus, do you remember the spray paint that you used to tag Audrey’s house?”
He flinches, and then shoots a guilty half glance at me. “It wasn’t my idea,” he mutters, and then fixes his gaze on the ground beneath him again. “I—I didn’t want to. I just wanted them to leave you alone. I told them to leave you alone. I said we could—we could frame someone else if we had to.”
“You’re a spineless coward,” I tell Gus, who seems to shrink into himself even more.
“I used that paint,” Lucy continues, “to tag the diner and tell them exactly where we were and who we’re with. So if you kill me, that evidence is my last words, and that’s evidence my mom can use. And believe me, Blake, she won’t stop until there is nothing left of you or your family or your company but ashes.”
To my amazement, Blake pales uncomfortably. “What are you talking about?” she snaps. “This is ridiculous, and I’ve heard enough. Up. To the top. Both of you. Gus, you started this. You’re going up with us to finish this.”
“First, though,” Lucy says, and then she steps closer, so close that she’s toe to toe with Veronica. She’s not even looking at Blake or Gus or Curtis or the gun. “I think I want the truth. If I’m going to die anyway, it couldn’t hurt. And I really just want to know. About my grandparents.”
A muscle in Veronica’s jaw jerks. “Oh,” she says softly. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”
“What is she talking about, Grandma?” Gus’s brows are furrowed in confusion. “Blake?”
“Shut up,” Blake tells him again.
Veronica hesitates, considering.
I struggle against Blake’s arms again, and she reaches over, snatches the gun from Gus’s hands, and raises it. Points it square at the middle of my head.
The barrel of the gun is cold and dark and round, a single eye staring back at me. Ready. Waiting.
Cursed family.
Dad saw his own death coming for him, too.
“Stop being difficult,” Blake snaps. “I can shoot you both and still make it look like a murder-suicide.”
“Except you would have to explain how your gun was the one we used,” Lucy says pleasantly, never even turning to look at Blake.
God, the sheer foolish courage this girl is capable of. For someone who cries about heights and spends more time falling off motorcycles than riding them, she is remarkably cool in the presence of a family of sociopaths.
“So, Veronica,” she continues, “tell me about my grandparents.”
Something like a smile crosses Veronica’s face. “You know what, Preston?” she says. “I like you. Like I liked your mother, and her mother before her. It’s a shame what happened. It really is. I’ve always enjoyed going toe-to-toe with the Preston women.”
We wait, all of us.
And it hits me that while Blake and Curtis might know the truth about my dad—and Gus probably does at this point, too—they might not have any idea about Lucy’s grandparents. They would have been children when it happened.
“I could answer it,” Curtis says bitterly.
Veronica levels her glare at him. “My son tried to tell Katy about this years ago, when she was looking for answers,” she says. “We worked out our own deal. Anything for family.”
Lucy’s gaze finds Curtis, level and unforgiving. “You wanted her to like you,” she says. “But you should know she never talked about you once, all those years. You should know that you were a speck in the distance behind her. You mean nothing to her.”
That, I think, is the worst thing she could have said to Curtis, because his pale face is suddenly blazing red, but he is stopped by Veronica holding up a hand.
“Your grandfather caused a bit too much trouble,” Veronica begins, ignoring her son. “Asking questions about safety. And procedures. We had a plan for all that, but we…we needed to get the park built on schedule. So I met with your grandfather to discuss his concerns, and I’m sure he never thought I was a threat to him. I was pregnant—eight months pregnant—with you, Curtis. I pushed your grandfather off the platform, Lucy.”
There is a collective intake of breath as her children stare at her. Curtis is the only one who doesn’t look surprised.
Although—Lucy doesn’t look surprised, either, just a little sick. A little sad. “You killed my grandpa because he had concerns about the safety of your park?” she asks.
My grandpa.
The words are so raw, so vulnerable in comparison with Veronica’s detached admission of her crime.
“Yes,” Veronica answers, as nonchalantly as if she were asking someone to stay for dinner. “My business, my home, my family. That was all that mattered. His wife—your grandmother—blamed my husband, whom I had not confided in. You remember, children, what your father was like. He wasn’t someone you could trust with a secret like that, but I did it for him. Anything for family.”
Gus is staring at her as if he’d never seen her before. “Grandma,” he whispers. “How could you?”
Blake scoffs. “Rich words coming from a boy who nearly sunk our family with his own impulsive crime.”
She turns back to me, face hardening again. “Stand still, Nelson,” she tells me.
“I did what I had to.” Veronica bares her teeth as she speaks. “I asked your grandmother to meet me, Lucy. Wife to wife. Mother to mother. She agreed, and I told her…I told her we couldn’t meet at my home and had to meet somewhere at night, because I couldn’t risk my husband knowing. She ate the whole story up, that I was the brave wife who was ready to tell the truth despite my husband. I killed her, too. Right here.”
Lucy’s face doesn’t change, but her hands are clenched in fists so tight that her knuckles have whitened. “Keep going,” she says quietly. “Tell me everything. You owe me that, Veronica.”
I want to rip out of Blake’s hold and run to Lucy, hug her until I can take away all the hurt that flashes in her eyes.
I have carried this same grief—facing the person who robbed me of my family and seeing their callous disregard.
“Pierce felt so horrible about what happened to your family,” Veronica continues, as if this is a pleasant conversation over mimosas and not the discussion of a cold-blooded double murder. “He took your mother in, and I did care for her, eventually. But those children I bore, they were mine. And she was not. But I did right by her. Paid for her college, even. And then she disappeared and never returned. If Pierce hadn’t asked, she would never have come back at all.”
She skips the part where she tried to destroy Katy for asking questions about her family. And the part where she treated Katy like an outsider who was never quite welcomed home.
“Did Pierce discover what you had done?” I ask. “Or did he only know about what happened to my dad?”
“Ah, yes, your father,” Veronica says. “His was an unfortunate accident. That’s all.”
Hot tears sting the back of my eyes. “That’s not true,” I snarl. “Did you pay off the commission that said your roller coaster was up to code? Who else did you pay off to make it look like it was my dad’s fault?”
“Everyone I needed to,” Veronica answers easily. “Everyone has a price. Or a breaking point.”
She must really, truly be confident that Lucy and I will die tonight, because she is giving out truth at a staggering rate.
“I kept it a secret all this time,” she muses softly, and for the first time I see a trace of sadness. “I would have carried that secret for Pierce always. But he found out, a few weeks ago. He was so cut up by it. And then, last Friday he came back to the house and told us he was going to come clean and disinherit every one of us when he died.”
She pauses, her eyes flicking back and forth between Lucy and Gus.
“So, Gus.” Lucy turns to him. Her eyes look haunted, but she gives him that annoyingly cheerful smile, as if they are just talking about the weather. “Why did you kill your grandfather?”
He is trembling, holding tight to the wooden base of the platform. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispers. “I really didn’t. Please.”
“What happened?” I fix him with a stare, and he cowers as if I were the one with the gun.
“I heard them all arguing,” he says. “And then…then Grandpa came up to his study, and I asked him if it was true. If he was going to cut us all off from his will, and if I’d still be able to live here or if I’d have to go live with my dad on the road and I couldn’t—I couldn’t—”
“That’s what you were worried about?” I blurt out in disbelief. “You overheard that your family covered up my dad’s death, and you were concerned about having to give up your mansion?”
Gus whimpers. “I didn’t hear all of it,” he protests. “I didn’t know what they had done. I was just…I was scared. Everything was changing, and everyone was fighting, and Grandpa was so mad. He said he didn’t want to see any of us ever again, that everyone in this family was rotten, and that I could kiss the house and all of it goodbye. He never liked me. I think he’d have been happy to kick me out like they kicked out my dad, and I didn’t think, I just picked up this—this paperweight on his desk—and I hit him.”
His words reverberate in the deadly silence in the clearing.
The bloodstain in the office. The already-dead body thrown from the roller coaster. Gus jumping at every noise. His mud-caked shoes. All of it. All of it.
And then Blake’s gun clicks as she removes the safety.
“Well,” she says softly, “I think we’ve all heard enough.”
She motions with the gun toward the platform.
When neither of us move, Blake’s lip curls. “What, did you think rescue was coming?” she asks. “You’ve stalled long enough.”
“The cops are coming,” I say, trying to sound confident.
“No,” Veronica says. “They aren’t.”
Fear settles into the pit of my stomach with finality.
Because she sounds as certain of that as she was when she spoke of murdering Lucy’s grandparents.
“He—You paid him off,” I say dully. The realization is both so jarring and so unsurprising that I have to catch my breath, sharply.
I’ve known him my whole life. But of course, of course he’s been paid to look the other way.
“Do you really think one of us broke into Cliff’s office to steal those files?” Veronica asks, a small smile curving across her face. “No, darling. When you have enough power, they just leave the door ajar for you themselves.”
Lucy doesn’t even look surprised.
How long has she suspected him?
Because it never occurred to me to think that Cliff, who has known me since I was a baby, would be part of covering up a murder. And framing my mom. Not even when I saw him digging in the park for evidence he shouldn’t have known would be there.
“Does the sheriff know?” Lucy asks. “What you did?”
“Not all of it, no,” Veronica says. “But when I called him this morning after Curtis broke into your motel, he said the door would be unlocked for a few hours. He didn’t ask any questions because he knows better.”
I grit my teeth. Did he suspect there was more to my father’s death, too? Has he always known? “What do you have on him?” I ask her.
“Oh, that’s always my brother,” Blake answers. “The petty criminal.”
“You hit Lucy?” I snarl, surging forward before Blake presses the gun to my temple again.
Curtis has the audacity to look apologetic. “I didn’t kill her,” he says, as if he deserves to be lauded for that. “Lucy, you and your mom are important to me.” His eyes fall on Gus, a complicated wave of emotion rolling across his face as he looks at his son. “But it’s my kid. You have to understand.”
“Is that why you tried to cast suspicion on Blake and Veronica?” Lucy asks. “When you told me at dinner that Pierce had been trying to make amends, did you want to push suspicion toward them so that it would be far away from Gus?”
Curtis looks as if he’s in physical pain, avoiding everyone’s eyes now, but especially Veronica’s, which are boring into him.
“I wanted him to be safe,” Curtis says finally. “I owed him that much. But I never meant you or Katy any harm. You have to believe that.”
As if it matters what we believe now.
Lucy rolls her eyes. “My mom warned me about you.” She manages to sound unreasonably sassy for someone currently being held at gunpoint. “I don’t care if she was important to you once upon a time.”
Veronica lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “We are the Anselms,” she answers. “We carry this town’s economy. We pay Cliff’s salary. We were never going to go down for Pierce’s death, and he knew it. He arrested Langley this morning so that Katy would have a suspect and leave us for good. And then we’d all be free to carry on as before.”
Blake taps her designer flats impatiently. “Enough,” she says, waving her gun at me. “Get up there. Both of you.”
My feet feel like lead as I take one step forward. And then another.
What will it feel like, to step off the edge of that platform? What will run through my head as the ground rushes up at me?
Will Dad be with me as I fall?
But then to my surprise, a smile unfurls across Lucy’s pale face, slowly, triumphantly. “No,” she says. “I don’t think we will.” Her eyes lock on mine. “Anything for family,” she says.
She pulls something from her pocket, screams loudly, and—
Well, she maces the roller coaster. Not Blake.
But she does try her best.
Then she whirls to me, yells “Catch,” and throws an object at me as hard as she can.
Which, because she is Lucy, is not terribly hard.
I snatch it out of the air. A…Taser?
Lucy kicks wildly at Blake, who is too busy staring at her in disbelief to react quickly enough. Lucy aims for Blake’s ankles with the kick, maybe because she doesn’t have the balance to kick any higher (we really have to work on that) and then screams use it at me.
I jam the Taser behind me against Curtis’s rib cage and pull the trigger. “Anything for family,” I breathe.
My Audrey, Dad might be saying. They’re all around me. I know they are. Dad and Lucy’s grandparents and Arthur Joyce. Everyone the Anselms have sacrificed for their family, their power, their chokehold on our town.
Curtis screams as the Taser makes impact, his body flailing as he falls backward against the platform.
